


keep dispose return

by strikinglight



Series: Squad Levi Week 2k15 [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, House Cleaning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-14
Updated: 2015-09-14
Packaged: 2018-04-20 18:29:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4797866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soldiers don’t need much and often live with even less. A place for everything, and everything in its place. </p><p>Or: Levi cleans house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	keep dispose return

**Author's Note:**

> Day 1 offering for [Squad Levi Week](http://squadleviweek.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr. Prompt: "empty spaces."

You don’t anticipate that you’re going to be keeping house in this castle much longer (meaning you and Eren, just you two, no one else, and that realization bites worse than the sludge at the bottom of a cold cup of coffee) and this is a task you don’t want to leave to anyone else. 

The boy wants to help—of course he does—but you won’t have it. You shake your head, wave him away with a terse “Just go to sleep.” You’re relieved when he complies right away for once, without protest; he’s so young but you can already see how the past few days have aged him, the deep, tired lines around his eyes that weren’t there before, and this is the only way you know how to be kind. As soon as he hits his bed, you figure, he’ll sleep deeply, and won’t dream.

So now it’s just you and three big boxes in the hallway, marked  _KEEP, DISPOSE,_ and  _RETURN._ That’s probably more than enough space for everything, because soldiers don’t need much and often live with even less. Your first, cursory sweep of the four rooms has already revealed as much—sheets folded, desks pushed up against the wall, shelves mostly bare, closets opening into a row of hanging uniforms and not much else. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

  
You do clothes first because with those you don’t need to think; civilian attire and other personal effects in the  _RETURN_ box, along with the best, the cleanest, the least worn of the uniforms. You take every single item down from its hangers as gently as if it was living, lay it across your lap. You fold flat and precise rectangles of fabric—white dress shirt, thick knitted sweater, suit jacket, green dress—and try not to remember the bodies that filled them out. (You tell yourself you’re not retracing those silhouettes in your imagination, standing side by side—eight arms folded in salute, four iron-straight backs, four sets of shoulders squared and determined.) The rest of the uniforms will go into the  _DISPOSE_ box. The  _KEEP_ box, for now, stands empty.

Cleaning out the rest of those rooms will be harder; you know this, and steel yourself.

 

* * *

 

Gunther’s room first.

It’s the emptiest of the four, and for some reason this makes you almost proud—this discipline, this utter unwillingness to leave any traces behind. Almost as if it wasn’t his space exactly, only the place he happened to find himself in, doing what needed to be done. Ready at any time to leave it.

Gunther’s survival kit sits on his desk, the worn leather bag leaning upright against the wall, like it’s waiting. Of course its contents are complete and perfectly maintained, typical of the best hunter and tracker in the Corps. Two small knives. Flint and steel. Cord and rope. A few things for first aid—scissors, bandages, pain killers, cotton, alcohol. Sewing needles. A spool of thread.

The rest of his possessions you find neatly lined up on a shelf mounted on the far wall of the room. Three wood carvings, each small enough to sit in your palm—a falcon, a deer, a wild cat, meticulously detailed down to the last antler and feather, the languid, curling tip of the tail (is this what he did with those knives in his spare time?). A yellowing medical book, probably borrowed from the infirmary, dog-eared at  _Gout_ and  _Arthritis._ A can of herbal tea—who did he have to beat up to get this?—with a note taped on the side in his familiar blunt, boxy hand. It reads  _Pa: One cup after every meal._ A cloth bag of seeds and another note. This time,  _Ma: Sweet pea. For the garden._

 

* * *

 

In the line of books on his desk, arranged alphabetically by title, you find the Erd you know:  _A Brief History of the World, Consolidated Scouting Reports (Years 840-845), On War._ On the shelf, an Erd you can picture well enough, in another life where there’s time and space and so much more earth to care for than they have now:  _Horse Breeds and Horse Care, The Mind of the Trout, The Northern Gardener, The Future of Animal Farming._

A glance out the window will show you that his room looks out onto the stables. You remember he named nearly all the horses, knew the sounds of their voices, and their steps. Is it possible that the ones that remain know he won’t be coming in the morning, bucket of oats at his hip, sugar cubes in hand?

The books on the bedside table, however, point you toward an Erd you barely recognize—slim, softbound volumes of poetry, myths, stories. Something called  _A Lover’s Discourse._ A book of sheet music.  It’s already something of a shock to you to discover that he was a reader at all—who has the time, after all, or the energy?—but you’d never in any life have him pegged for such a romantic. The thought makes your skin prickle; you don’t understand poems, and most music is all noise to you, and from what you know all the human heart does is pump blood out to the rest of the body. What is all this doing here? What’s it for?

In the side table drawer, you find a steel candle holder. A box of matches, empty but for a few blackened wood stubs. Used candles by the dozen, some no more than hardened pools of wax, burned all the way down. 

Pushed further back behind the candles, hidden, almost secret: an oval picture frame the size of your hand, a painted portrait in miniature smiling out at you from behind the glass. A tiny black box. The slim, unadorned golden band nestled inside is probably already worth a year’s pay. (And it’d have been two years’ pay, you’re sure, for one with a stone.)

Ah.

 _Very pretty,_ you think, close your eyes, listen to the Erd in your imagination saying, _Brighter than the sun_ _._

 

* * *

 

The rest of his room is mostly in order, but Auruo’s desk looks like a small warzone.

You sigh and pick up his fountain pen where it lies uncapped and forgotten, bleeding out all its ink onto a perfectly good stack of blank parchment pages—that’s at least the first three or four pages ruined, useless, that dark, spreading pool soaked all the way through them. The cap has rolled beneath the desk, as you see when you bend to find it and nearly hit your head.

He’s left a leather notebook open next to the pile of paper; you pick it up and find it full of recipes, handwritten in big, rounded, unfamiliar script. Vegetable soup. Roast boar. Omelette rice. Baked potato. Auruo’s smaller, pointier hand spiders across the margins of each page:  _Substitute 1c fresh diced tomato with 1/2c tomato paste. If no boar, normal pork will serve, just trim the fat. Get sharper knives, for God’s sake. Ask mom where she buys her fresh mint. No one else cooks in this hellhole. REAL FOOD (all in capital letters, underlined thrice)._

(You and Eren have been subsisting on bread and water and cured meat since arriving home from the expedition. Maybe you should keep the notebook, but then again you’d probably just burn the kitchen down.)

Fanned out across the far side of the table, a series of portraits in crayon: _Aururoruo_ (an accurate enough likeness, all things considered—squiggly lines for the puffy upswing of the hair, and the squinty eyes, even if the artist doesn’t quite know how to color inside the lines),  _Surve Cops_ (a line of stick figures, with green blobs for capes, and blobs of different colors for hair—black, yellow, light brown, dark brown, red),  _Bruders Hors_ (two chubby oval shapes for the head and body, four sticks for the legs, S-shapes for the hairs of the tail) _._ All signed  _Georg Bossard, 5._

At least the kid knows how to spell his own name, you think, and gather the drawings into a pile.

 

* * *

 

It’s nearly midnight by the time you get to Petra’s room. The night has begun to fold in on you, press down so heavily that as soon as her door swings open—the wood light and utterly silent, the hinges still so well-oiled—you need to stop, lean against the door frame, suddenly breathless.

On her bedside table (you keep your eyes turned studiously away from her bed), a scattering of tiny pins—you remember them glinting in her hair the night of the New Year ball. (Last year, was it? The year before?) A hand mirror. A glass bottle. You pop the cork open and fragrance wafts out—you recognize rosewater, herbs, the soft, lingering scent in the air as she passed.

Her desk is immaculate, of course. You can imagine it being that way with more or less everything she touched—a place for everything, guided by her hands, and everything moving gently into its place. The lid is screwed tightly shut over a bottle of blue ink, nearly empty. Her pen lies next to it, so straight it looks like it’s standing at attention; you reach out to touch it, seeing behind your eyes as you do so her fingers bent around it, pressing the tip to paper, making it dance, and slowly withdraw your hand. Later.

You’re not quite sure what to do with the letters she hasn’t finished. You pick up the pages gingerly, holding them with the very tips of your fingers as though they might burn you. Half of you wants to look down and drink up her penmanship with your eyes—you’ve watched her write often enough to know what it looks like, every dotted I and crossed T, the delicate sweep and curl of the capital L—but the other half is convinced the words will do nothing but cut into you, tiny knives of sound in the empty space of her room, and you jerk your head away, pained.

It’s only phrases that you catch as you carry them out into the hall toward theboxes.  _Dear Papa_ and  _leaving tomorrow_ and  _the boys_ and  _so glad I’m_ and  _Captain Levi is–_

Your heart nearly slams to a halt at the sight of your name, and it’s all you can do to stop yourself from dropping the papers you’re holding all over the floor.

 _What, Petra?_ you ask the ether, the empty hallway that looks pale and drained of substance, right down to the last stone, without her.  _What do you think I am?_

 

* * *

 

At the end of the night, it’s you and the three big boxes in the hallway. You close up the one marked  _DISPOSE_ first, carry it down to the basement, toward the incinerator. The smoke, billowing from the chimneys like a signal, should take the spirit of whatever they need up to them, whatever precious burned things they forgot before leaving.

The  _RETURN_ box you bring to the common room, for sorting in the morning. You’ve got all the information in your head and you need to write down as soon as you wake up—addresses to houses you’ve never visited, the names of people you’ve never met, you do owe it to the four of them to remember at least  _that_ much—then maybe you can pay one of the grunts to take everything into the city. You know there’s a form letter you need to write, to accompany each package, something that includes the phrases  _a hero_ and  _killed in action_ and  _57th_ expedition and  _service to mankind_ and  _we grieve with you._ The words will not even come close to what’s true, but you’ll write them anyway. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

The doors of the four rooms are closed now, when you come back to them.

Soldiers don’t need much, and often live with even less. Only the  _KEEP_ box remains, lid hanging open and bereft, empty. You allow yourself to drop down to the floor next to it, back to the stone wall, rest your head on your folded arms. You close your eyes.


End file.
